We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love.

In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives—work, knowledge, home, politics—have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and pedants. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs show us the way. As we will see, the amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable, seeks independence—and changes the world.

The Amateur is a passionate manifesto for the liberated life, one that questions authority and reclaims the iconoclast as a radical hero of our times.

Reviews

“A satisfying celebration of the ‘great romantic dream … a society that breaks free of the vicious circle of undefined productivity.’”

“Rather than thinking of amateurs as dabblers, weekend gardeners, busying themselves with unimportant tasks, Merrifield defends the creative and political potential of doing things we love for pleasure. Amateurs take risks, seek independence, innovate by choosing a less obvious direction. By exploring the work of figures like Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Hannah Arendt, and their impact on his own professional life, Merrifield succeeds in highlighting the revolutionary spirit of the amateur.”

“Here amateurs (a word derived from the Latin ‘to love’) are non-alienated citizens; enthusiasts, who counter the mechanical expertise and technical formalism of modern society; passionate obsessives standing up for values that need defending. Merrifield, an urban theorist who writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics, offers an idiosyncratic canon (Dostoevsky, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said) in which he holds up amateurs as outside-the-box thinkers, inter- and post-disciplinary radicals. It’s a stirring book whose critique of contemporary work culture will be instantly recognisable. It also doubles as a moving memoir of a working-class intellectual.”

No past revolution, she says, can be attributed to professional revolutionaries. Usually it was the other way around: “revolution broke out and liberated, as it were, the professional revolutionaries from wherever they happened to be – from jail, or from the coffee house, or from the library.”

Five great amateurs whose work changed the world, from author of The Amateur, Andy Merrifield.

In this excerpt from The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, author Andy Merrifield explores how he likes to live in a city through the poetry of the Beats and the joys of what amateur urbanist Jane Jacobs called ‘the intricate sidewalk ballet’.

Using figures like Jane Jacobs, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord and Hannah Arendt as guides, Merrifeld shows us how to resist bureaucracy and authority and embrace a liberated life where passions guide you.